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Conference on New Ideas for Experienced Teachers
June 9–13, 2001
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
John Mayer
Executive Director
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction
312-906-5307
jmayer@cali.org
The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is a non-profit consortium of 183 law schools. CALI publishes a library of over 150 distance learning teaching materials in 25 different legal education subject areas. All of our materials are authored by law faculty for law faculty.
Over the past three years, CALI has been creating up to 50 new lessons/year with teams of experienced faculty writing lessons covering the first year and core law school courses. These teams of faculty collaborate for one year to create a series of small, modular “lessonettes” that can be used in the classroom or assigned outside of the classroom to law students. The goal is to leverage the thousands of interactions that the faculty-authors have with students and imbue the lessons with mini-Socratic dialogues that capture the essence of legal education. CALI lessons do not just teach doctrine, they attempt to teach critical thinking skills and analysis through the computer medium.
Mr. Mayer will report on the progress of the Criminal Law, Property and Torts Fellowships and will briefly layout CALI’s plans for the near future. In addition, Mr. Mayer will demonstrate a dozen or so different approaches to creating on-line interactions as can be found in the most recently published CALI materials. In addition, he will demonstrate how law faculty can use a free tool from CALI to create their own lessons and even build on existing CALI lessons to extend and refine their use for a particular focus or need.